Only two months deadAnd there you were, suddenly back within reach.I got on the Northern Line at Leicester SquareAnd sat down and there you were. And thereThe dream started that was no dream.I stared and you ignored me.Your part in the dream was to ignore me.Mine was to be invisible --- helplesslyUnable to manifest myself.Simply a blank, bodiless gaze --- I restedThe whole weight of my unbelieving stareOn your face, impossibly real and there.Not much changed, unchanging under my pressure.You only shuddered slightly as the carriage Bored through the earth Northward.You seemed older --- death had aged you a little.Paler, almost yellowish, as you had been In the morgue, but impassive.As if the unspooling track and shudder of the journeyWere the film of your life that occupied you.Your gaze, inward, resisted my gaze.Your basket on your knee, heavy with packages.Your handbag on a long strap. Your handsFolded over the heap UnshiftingMy gaze leaned against you as a gazeMight lean its cheek on a hand. The impossibleWent on shraing your slight shuddering, your eyelids,Your lips lightly pursed, your melancholy.Just as in the dream that insistsOn the plainly impossible, and lastsSecond after second after second, Growing more and more incredible ----As if you slowly turned your face and slowly Smiled full in my face, daring meThere, among the living, to speak to the dead.But you seemed not to know the part you were playing.And, just as in the dream, I did not speak.Only tried to seperate the memoryOf your face from this new face you wore.If you got out at Chalk Farm, I told myself,I would follow you home. I would speak.I would make some effort to seizeThis offer, this saddened substituteReturned to me by death, revealed to meThere in the Underground --- surely as if For my examination and approval.Chalk Farm came. I got up. You stayed.It was the testing moment.I lifted your face from you and took itOutside, onto the platform, in this dreamWhich was the whole of London's waking life.I watched you move away. carried awayNorthwards, back into the abyss, Your real new face unaltered, lit, unwitting, Still visible for seconds, then gone, Leaving me my original emptinessOf where you had been and abruptly were not.But everything is offered three times.And suddenly you were sitting in your own home.Young as before, untouched by death. LikeA hallucination --- not to be blinked away.A migraine image --- warping my retina.You seemed to have no idea you were yourself.Even borrowing the name of your oldest rival ---As if it had lain handiest. Yet you wereSo much youself my brain's hemispheresSeemed to have twisted slightly out of phaseTo know you you yet realise that you Were not you. To see you you and yet So brazenly continuing to be other.You had even kept your birthdate --- exactAs a barb on the impossibility.And lived only two miles from where we had lived.Other spirits colluded in a support team Of new parents for you, a new brother.You courted me all over again --- covertly.I breathed a bewildering air --- the gasOf the underworld in which you moved so easyAnd had your new being. You told me The dream of your romantic life, that had lasted Throughout our marriage, there in Paris --- as if You had never returned until now.Death had repossessed your talent. Or maybeHad converted it to a quieter thing ---A dumbly savage longing, a submergedFerocity of longing in eyesSo weirdly unaltered. I struggled awhileIn my doubled alive and dead existence.I thought: 'This is coincidence -- the mere Inertia of my life's momentum, trying To keep things as they were, as if the showMust at all costs go on, same masks, same parts,No matter who the actors.' Gasping for air, At the bottom of the Rhine, barely conscious,Indolently like somebody drowning I kicked free.Your gentle ultimatum relaxed its hold.True to your ghostly humour, next thingYou sent me a pretty card from Honolulu.After that, an afterworld momento,Every year a card from Honolulu.It seemed you had finessed your return to the living By leaving me as you bail, a hostage stoppedIn the land of the dead.Less and LessDid I think of escape.Even in my dreams, our house was in ruins.But suddenly --- the third time --- you were there.Youner than I had ever known you. YouAs if new made, half a wild roe, halfA flawless thing, priceless, facetedLike a cobalt jewel. You came behind me(At my helpless moment, as I lowered A testing foot into the running bath)And spoke --- peremptory, as a familar voiceWill startle out of a river's uproar, urgent, Close: "This is the last. This one. This timeDon't fail me."